The senators voted and Net Neutrality was ruled out. However, there’s still time until April 27 to keep calling all your senators or BOMBING their emails to push for the decision to be rules out. Net Neutrality won’t be officially dead until April 27. There’s still time.

Please please PLEASE call your senators and bomb their emails. Please do not let take away net neutrality. It is so incredibly important.

Yes having internet is already no free, but paying for packages? Allowing them to control what loads and at what pace?? Less people will have access to social media. Less people will know what’s actually happening outside America and by default less people will know what’s happening IN America.

Those tweets and fb posts about poc being mistreated?? You’ll see them wayy less with people not being able to have access to post and companies having more control on whay goes out and what loads. Woman disappearing and mistreatment? Will hear way less about it mysteriously. Syria?? Will appear way less on your feed and NOT because it has stopped. Someone in the government doing questionable things? Won’t be out in the light asnit should be. Charity online? People won’t be able to ask for money for surgeries or charity if they don’t have the money to even access the internet in the first place.

I could continue with more examples on how important and needed net neutrality is. Please don’t let it die.

With Net Neutrality, ISPs will rely on time and confusing language to slowly erode the internet.

But what is Net Neutrality all about? What do we stand to lose?

When the internet was first created, Net Neutrality was the unspoken standard. If you paid for internet, you could expect that you could go anywhere with the same speed. Of course, some sites were slower (bogged down with too many graphics or viruses), but for the most part, this meant that if you went to a website, it was going to load for you at a comparably similar speed to other sites like it.

Net Neutrality was penned to make this a spoken standard, as there were already providers who were determined to go against this. Most notoriously, BitTorrent was being so heavily throttled by Comcast that in some cases, it was entirely blocked. Additionally, the FCC ordered Comcast not to block certain programs (like Skype). This was because of the educational value of the internet: a vast and endless sea of information more easily accessible than any other time in human history.

The Supreme Court shot down both of these, but the FCC did not give up.

In 2010, the FCC released a set of rules that would come to be the Net Neutrality that we rely on, but with a huge caveat: while Comcast and the like could not throttle competitors, they could have multiple speed tiers set based on their own whims. This meant that mobile devices were given much slower internet speeds while being charged more for the privilege, as one example. This is important! We’ll talk about it in a later post today.

(This was done as Comcast, who owned Hulu, was attempting to throttle Netflix in an effort to make their own service look better in comparison)

In 2014, there was a belief that ‘narrowing’ Net Neutrality would be wise, and that one such allowance for businesses would be that they could charge for websites to use a “fast lane”. What this would mean is that if a site could pay the fee (unspecified), traffic to their site would be faster. Obviously not an issue for Google or Facebook, but for smaller startups it would directly impact their ability to compete. Public response was loud and critical, although in 2015 Republicans attempted to block the FCC’s ability to enforce Net Neutrality.

There’s a slew of situations where Net Neutrality was tested: Madison River Communications in 2005 blocked Vonage, AT&T warned users that wi-fi constituted as “theft of service”, Comcast blocked VPNs…all of these were things that Net Neutrality was able to squash.

Without anything to block them, you can guarantee that these same companies, now larger and more money-hungry, with more invested interest in controlling what you’re allowed to see, will try their hardest to censor and throttle the internet.

They’ll do it slowly, but they’ll still do it. Keep up the pressure on your politicians and don’t let this issue go away!

There’s a lot of talk about physical violence and employment discrimination against trans people, but there’s one aspect you don’t hear much about: health care.

According to 2011′s National Transgender Discrimination Survey, nearly 20% of survey respondents reported having been refused care because they’re transgender.More than 25% reported being harassed in a doctor’s office, and 50% had to actually educate their doctors on aspects of trans health care.

“I have been refused emergency room treatment even when delivered to the hospital by ambulance with numerous broken bones and wounds,” says one survey respondent.

Kanghua Ren - known as ReSet to his more than a million subscribers - filmed himself filling the biscuits with toothpaste and replacing them in their packaging before feeding five of them to the homeless man in January last year.

As the 52-year-old man - named by authorities as Gheorge L. - ate the cookies, ReSet jibed: “Maybe I’ve gone a bit far, but look at the positive side: this will help him clean his teeth. I think he hasn’t cleaned them since he became poor.“

ReSet, a 20-year-old originally from China, earned more than €2000 from YouTube for advertising linked to the video, which was viewed thousands of times, according to court documents reported by the Spanish daily El Pais.

He now faces a charge of a crime against moral integrity, with Spanish prosecutors seeking a sentence of two years in prison and an order to pay €30,000 in compensation to the homeless man.

Gheorge L., originally from Romania, said he was ill after eating the toothpaste-filled biscuits. “I got sick after five minutes and threw up,” he related, explaining that he had not known who ReSet was and came to fear for his life.

After the video drew immediate outrage, ReSet returned to see his victim the following day and made a further film. Asking him how the biscuits had gone down, he said: “People exaggerate over jokes in the street (played) on a beggar, when surely if it’s done to a normal person they wouldn’t say anything.”

As the controversy continued to grow, ReSet and a friend again visited Gheorge L. with a camera, with the intention of spending the night with him, at which point a witness called the police.

Prosecutors said ReSet had later deleted the video and offered the homeless man €300 for his silence, in an attempt to “reestablish his image” and “ingratiate himself with public opinion”.

ReSet, who is currently on bail awaiting judgement, had previously offered sandwiches filled with his cats’ excrement to children and elderly people, the court heard.

Gheorge L. told El Pais he had been imprisoned under the Ceaucescu dictatorship in Romania and spent time in a mental institution, but he did not know for what. He said he had never been treated so badly on the street, adding that the bar where he vomited after the incident regularly helped him with food and clothes.

Text “RESIST” to 50409 to send an email to your Senators/Representatives! Tell them to vote for the CRA and give them details to persuade them on why Net Neutrality is so important and why it should be preserved. You can also call at 202-224-3121.

Script for phone calls:

Now get to it!! We only have until April 23rd to keep our Internet freedom otherwise.

The following is a caption of the image above:

[Call Your Senators about Markey’s Net Neutrality Petition
(2/26):

You: Hello, my name is [insert name here]. I am calling from
[zip code].

You: I am calling to let [SENATOR] know I want them to vote
in favor of Senator Markey’s resolution to repeal the FFC’s December decision
to unwind Net Neutrality via the Congressional Review Act.

You: Polling Suggests 60-80% of Americans do not support the
rollback of Net Neutrality, and voting in support of this bipartisan resolution
will help ensure this issue isn’t singlehandedly decided by five people.

For GOP Senators: If
[SENATOR] doesn’t support Markey’s resolution, we will make this an issue every
single time [SENATOR] is up for reelection.

I’m praying the success of the vote in California will embolden other states supporting NN (like my own) to follow suit.

According to battleforthenetonly one vote is needed to ensure the FFC repeal of Net Neutrality is knocked down in the Senate, so calling the Senators who have not voted on the issue of Net Neutrality is crucial.

Additionally, battleforthenet states that 218 votes are needed to sway the House (of Representatives). As of now, 161 is the current tally, with only 57 votes needed to turn things around.

As of April 17, 2018, there are six days left before April 23, 2018.

I know many of you are saying “how many times are we gonna have to do this”

once more.

Once more.

This is the last chance to preserve Net Neutrality on the federal level.